Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The Spectacular Goat climbs Twitter mountain and wins

For our ongoing look at the best practices in social media, we
will focus for the next few weeks on Twitter.

Meet, John with Spectacular Goat, a street food emporium
which specializes in pizza in their mobile wood fired oven. Based out of
Warwick, Warwickshire, UK, the company is mobile and goes where it wants which is why social media has part to be part of the marketing equation.

Q: When and why did you join Twitter?

A: We joined twitter back in May as we set up the business.
I used Twitter personally and knew it could be a powerful tool if used well. We
have just under 600 followers, but we engage with them and that's the key.

Q: We have found only about 50% of pizzerias have a presence
on social media. What advice do you have for pizzerias in terms of social
media?

A: It's free. It enables you to engage with people and build
relationships. You can support other local businesses and they will support you
which means you build a community. The human nature likes communities and you
can create special offers for them so they feel special. It can work for you as
you want it too.

Q: What you have found to be the most effective posts on
Twitter?

A: Without a doubt, people love pictures and video.When you
have 140 characters to get a message across, a picture is really worth a
thousand words!

Q: What is the key to success with social media for any
pizzeria?

A: There are plenty of people out there who are 'experts' or
'gurus' and each preach their own way, what they like and dislike. Take it all
with a pinch of salt and experiment with what works for you.

What I've found is:

It's all about engagement; if someone tweets you respond. If
they retweet you thank them. If lots of people retweet you tweet a general
thank you, so you don't have endless tweets saying thank you!

It's not just about promoting your business; if you were in
a room of people and one person just kept talking about themselves and their
latest offer it becomes dull and irritating. I work on the general idea of
thirds. A third of your tweets should be about you as an individual, your
character and the people in the business - there needs to be a human behind the
tweets and it needs to show. A third of your tweets should be educational,
demonstrating your knowledge about food and the expertise you have. Don't be
afraid to give your customers/followers advice on how to cook great pizza at
home. Only a few will try, very few if any will succeed in making anything that
comes close to your pizza. A third of your tweets should be business related.
Offers, promotion of new pizzas, information on opening hours etc.

Q: What is unique to your restaurant that you try to
highlight on social media?

A: we're mobile we do not have a fixed location so we use
social media to help build a focus for our up coming events. We promote the
event, we promote other food vendors and they promote us. We work together to
make the event and pull in our respective communities.